Ariel Castro’s Thousand-Year Sentence

It’s tempting to look at this afternoon’s sentencing of Ariel Castro, who kept three women as prisoners in his house in Cleveland, to life plus a thousand years as a final stamp on the decade of evil he perpetrated. Anyone who watched the court hearing, though, would recognize it as more of a set of ellipses. Judge Michael Russo—who presided over the bizarre affair with equanimity—noted that, while Castro could only die in prison once, a millennium behind bars was a sentence commensurate with the harm he had done. And therein lies the reason it’s impossible to think of this as closure: Castro’s actions warrant ten lifetimes worth of punishment, but his victims have only one in which to recover.

If there is any crude metric for the scale of Castro’s crimes, it was in Russo’s enumeration of the counts against him; there were so many that, at points, the judge sounded like a child practicing his multiplication tables. A better measure was in the nuances of the victim statement that Michelle Knight, the woman who was held the longest, read in court. The man who sexually abused her and beat and starved her to induce five miscarriages was also the churchgoer with a bottomless capacity to rationalize his actions. He attended the vigils held in honor of Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry and brought home missing-person flyers bearing their pictures. She remembered how he taunted her about the lack of vigils in her name.

Listening to Castro’s plea to the court, one was reminded that evil sometimes has no operational definition for itself. Castro opined that Knight, DeJesus, and Berry were “failed by the F.B.I.,” which neglected to question him. Had it done so, he suggested, the entire affair could’ve ended long before. Amid the many loops of circular reasoning in his statement, Castro’s most common refrain was “I’m not a monster, I’m a normal person.” His version of events included the confession that he found it hard to hold a job because of the stress of his “home situation.” He was adamant in his claim that he didn’t “plan” Knight’s abduction, because he’s not that kind of person; the problem was that he’d become addicted to pornography. He minimized his actions toward Knight by pointing out that “no one was looking for her.” Most repellently, he claimed the sex between him and his captives was consensual. The man who chained them up, denied them food, beat them, and threatened to kill them didn’t see the sex as “forceful”—“I learned that these girls were not virgins.” He uttered the sentence “I would like to apologize to the victims” while simultaneously arguing he was not a victimizer. The subtext of his meandering mea culpa was that, sometimes, villainy so easily masquerades as normalcy because it’s unaware, or unable or simply unwilling to acknowledge, that it’s even wearing a mask.

Castro’s actions—and his blithe rationales—raise inescapable questions: How many other women are suffering in similar hells while we, meanwhile, fail to recognize men like him, even when they work with us, live near us, smile as we naïvely pass them on the street? (See Malcolm Gladwell for more on how sexual predators get away with it.) If Castro’s own children were unaware of the depths of his depravity, how can we prevent this from happening again?

Michelle Knight, four feet seven, spoke with what sounded like a young girl’s voice; when the police first came into the house and rescued her and the two others, she was so emaciated that they thought she was a child. She understood better than anyone in that courtroom, perhaps including Castro, who and what her captor was. She spoke movingly, telling Castro that her nightmare was over but his was just beginning, remarking that she would not let what he had done define the rest of her life. It’s a noble objective—one that is no doubt shared by the two other former captives, who were not present in the courtroom. “I will live, but you’ll die a little each day,” she told him. “After eleven years, I am finally being heard, and it is liberating.”

Photograph by Tony Dejak/AP

Jelani Cobb has been a contributor to The New Yorker and newyorker.com since 2013, writing frequently about race, politics, history, and culture.